1. One or Several Entertainment Economies?

1The study of the economic dimensions of music and the performing arts truly took off about fifty years ago. Art historians had taken an interest in the economic dimension of entertainment since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the work of Aby Warburg (2004; Surgers 2009) and his circle on the Medici court, for example. However, festival historians were those who undertook the creation of a cultural and social history of entertainment that also drew on accounting sources (Boiteux 1977, or more recently Grell 2002). Such an approach also characterized the research carried out by specialists from other disciplines, in particular musicologists and more specifically those working on the history of opera, but also literature and theatre scholars, as well as urban historians. However, these studies never constituted a well-defined—let alone unified—field.

2The Italian case is particularly interesting in this regard. In 1977, Martine Boiteux, who was then a member of the École française de Rome, proposed a detailed study of an aristocratic festival held in the papal city in 1634 by Cardinal Antonio Barberini during Carnival: the Giostra del Saraceno (Boiteux 1977). Since she wanted to identify the festival’s patrons, suppliers, and beneficiaries, the historian conducted a meticulous analysis of the carnival’s accounting archives. Also published in 1977, a highly scholarly study of carnival in Rome under the pontificate of Clement IX by musicologist Margaret Murata was based on the analysis of numerous accounting documents (Murata 1977). Clearly, festivals reflected an art of spending specific to the Italian nobility, which subsequent historical studies helped to further characterize. Those by Richard Goldthwaite (1993) and Renata Ago (1998, 2003) notably showed how the social fluidity specific to Rome ensured a prompt turnover in the demand for luxury goods, thus explaining the growing extravagance of patronage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the case of Rome, the work of Renata Ago (2003, 2009) and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (2001) on the Roman high aristocracy’s indebtedness and spending has proven extremely useful for research on the arts.

3In turn, this literature paved the way for the large-scale study by historian and economist Guido Guerzoni (2006) entitled Apollo e Vulcano. I mercati artistici in Italia (1400-1700). In this book, the performing arts are considered as a way of spending that is linked to what would be termed today the “psychology of consumption.” As Guerzoni explains, according to the prevailing view in the nineteenth century, aristocrats were considered poor managers who lacked rationality and the consumer goods of the elites were deemed economically marginal, a view that long prevented economic historians from taking an interest in them.

6Therefore, over the decades, it is not an economy of art as such that has emerged, but rather diverse approaches that have been invented through the discovery of new sources and a broadening of questions, taking them beyond the artistic realm.

8For the contemporary period, the analysis is so fragmented that it would be unrealistic to attempt to provide an exhaustive presentation of existing work. The musicologists who have studied editorial production or the manufacturing of musical instruments have discovered accounting and statistical sources, thus making economists of themselves for the length of a chapter or sometimes an entire book (Devriès 1987; Devriès-Lesure 1993; Haine 1985). Moreover, studies on the history of the musical profession have often come across economic issues, whether linked to professional organisation (Ehrlich 1985; Escoffier 2020; Golding 2018; Rempe 2023; Rohr 2001; Russell 1987) or musical entrepreneurship (Corbière 2023; Loncle 2018; Metzner 1998; Prévot & Bonjour 2024; Weber 2004), which they had to take into consideration.

9The financial structures and operating methods of theatres have fascinated many researchers. There even exists a whole literature that tends to reduce theatre to a question of economic profitability, which has given rise to countless discussions (Agid & Tarondeau 2008, 2010; Baumol & Bowen 1966; Lang 1968). In the historical field, the Opéra de Paris—due to its vast archives and to the complex problems stemming from the interwoven interests of private entrepreneurs and the state—has been studied more than most other theatres in Europe (Chimènes 1990; Hemmings 1993, 1994; Leroy 2006; Loncle 2010, 2018; Morand 2007; Nicolle 2020a, 2020b; Pasler 2010; Patureau 1991; Renaud 1997; Spies 1998; Thiellay 2019; Yon 2008). These studies, conducted by musicologists, theatre historians, sociologists, and economists, outline a fairly clear conceptual framework in which the nexus of economic issues at the Opéra de Paris lay between the administration, subsidies, and taxes—in other words, on a rather macroscopic scale, favouring the perspective of artistic directors and political decision-makers. Regarding other types of stage productions, both in France and Italy, several studies have highlighted the links between strengthening royal power and developing a “cultural policy,” thus placing financial support for theatres within complex, fluctuating strategies (Lemaigre-Gaffier 2016; Traversier 2009).

10A widespread practice among researchers has been to restrict their studies to a single playhouse or a single city’s playhouses. There have been few attempts to go beyond this and to consider the national, European, or global framework, thus allowing for the observation of the large-scale financial flows and circulation of works or artists that have underpinned the music and entertainment economy (Charle 2008, 2015; Davis 2000; Markovits 2021; Marseille & Eveno 2002; Traversier 2015; Woodfield 2000). An added difficulty has been the often elusive boundaries between theatre, show, entertainment, performance, and leisure: these objects have been difficult to grasp and have rarely been studied with solid documentary evidence (Horrall 2001; Leroy 1990; Plumb 1973; Taylor 1991, 1992). In all these cases, researchers have adopted a bird’s-eye view, and the perspective of historians has often prevailed over that of practitioners in the field.

11Lastly, in the field of literary studies, another approach has focused on the representation and dramaturgical role of economic issues in plays. Money, debt, contracts, and value are all themes and subjects evoked by playwrights, and studied, for example, in Molière’s work by Pierre Force (1994), although solely in relation to the history of philosophy (and notably the Nicomachean Ethics) rather than to the actual conditions of production. This type of approach has given rise to an examination of the fluctuating boundaries between literary practices and economic discourse (Citton 2001; Poirson, Citton & Biet 2008), as well as to a specific field of study called literature & economics (Akdere & Baron 2018). These socioeconomic stakes eventually intersected with the plays that gave rise to them: the character of the selfish manservant in late seventeenth-century comedy, for example, can be explained by the crisis in monetary values at the time (Biet 2002). It became clear that playwrights, far from cutting themselves off from the daily and commercial life of troupes, took an interest in it and incorporated the economic changes of their time into their writing (Poirson 2011).

12What has emerged from this literature review is that there are not one but several music and entertainment economies, which differ less because they apply to distinct periods and spaces (this goes without saying) than because the types of sources favoured, the definitions of concepts, or the skills employed by researchers rarely overlap. Despite this extreme fragmentation, three main ways of linking entertainment and economic issues can be distinguished in the studies discussed so far. The most common for the Ancien Régime has consisted in emphasizing the significant place given to extravagant spending among the wealthiest or to large-scale editorial and theatrical trade. For the contemporary period, the focus has rather been on the mechanisms of artistic markets, the role played by the state in the music and entertainment economy, or the financing and taxation of theatre activities. Moreover, what works of art say about economic concepts, actors, and practices has primarily interested specialists of the modern period.

13It should be added that spatial compartmentalization has remained significant. There have been few attempts to tackle long periods with a single methodological and theoretical framework in order to highlight permanence in a field where change was rather slow (among the few exceptions: Del Prete 2024).

2. Ordinary Economic Practices

15Since the 1990s, numerous studies have focused on the sociohistorical conditions of economic data production (see the review in Pailha 2023). The statistics developed in political circles have been the subject of recent work, as evidenced by the issue on colonial statistics (“Statistiques coloniales”) published in 2024 in Histoire & Mesure (Touchelay 2024). More broadly, research has highlighted the subjective role of historical actors in economic operations, for example through the close reading of accounting archives or statistical series (Desrosières 1998 [1993], 2008). Such entries addressed concrete, ordinary issues, especially when they were produced by trade professionals, and they had some impact on more general economic norms, which have long been the purview of historians.

17This issue follows in the footsteps of researchers whose work has incorporated every economic practice adopted in the field, outside a scholarly framework. Indeed, although they were not familiar with economic literature, many agents who were in charge of organizing music and entertainment or marketing these events were led to name the things that they wished to control, to generalize the phenomena that they observed, and to identify the reasons for the failure or success of their decisions. Beyond the diversity of fields and modes of action, these practices resulted in the creation of communities of experience, which leads to hypothesizing that, outside the restricted circles of professional thinkers, practitioners in the field developed tools to organize the economic realities to which they were confronted. These tools belong to what recent historical production has termed practical rationalities. This expression is used to characterize both the practices of people with no expertise and repetitive daily activities: quantifying, calculating, recording, and inventorying, which make the exchange of goods or services possible.

18Scholarly discourse has mostly overlooked the knowledge that social actors applied in the field, in extremely varied ways. In 2006, the collective work Écrire, compter, mesurer. Vers une histoire des rationalités pratiques, edited by Natacha Coquery, François Menant, and Florence Weber, notably established the value of an approach to Ancien Régime economic realities that takes into account non-academic intellectual techniques, such as accounting entries or measurement systems (Coquery, Menant & Weber 2006). Drawing on ethnology (Goody 1977), the initiators of the project believed that it was essential to examine the meaning that stakeholders imparted to their practices, the categories that they used to take action, and the effectiveness of their techniques. From the perspective of historical observation, this research project also emphasized the time when documents were produced (in company offices, in state administrative services, or in the domestic setting) and the ritual dimension of many economic practices that went far beyond the cognitive or rationality questions to which they were too often reduced.

19Therefore, entertainment writing cannot be limited to that which concerns performance, whether it be writing plays, opera libretti, musical scores, or staging manuals. The process of producing a theatre performance also included keeping account and business correspondence books, and drawing up artist contracts, balance sheets, and advertising material. Outside production structures, a heterogeneous literature encompasses public debates on corporate legislation or financing, judicial or administrative supervision archives, etc. The specificity of these documents is that they were mostly penned by people who were not professional writers, yet who wrote as part of their profession. Made up of a combination of domestic and professional entries (Lahire 1993), but also scholarly and popular ones, this literature, which seems secondary as far as performance is concerned, appears primary when it comes to production.

20The practical rationality approach raises the more general question of specialization. Although the figure of the expert was only formalised at the end of the nineteenth century, recent work has shown that “expertise situations” (Anheim 2011) were already numerous in the medieval and modern periods, raising many issues, from the certification and transmission of knowledge to the delimitation of a professional territory (Brétéché & Hermant 2021; Castiglione & D’Ericco 2020; Guichard 2011). Thus, in the eighteenth century, surgeons sought to avoid being lumped together with barbers, with whom they had long been associated, by positioning themselves as experts before the courts, thanks to a set of knowledge that they presented as objective (Rabier 2016). In the visual arts, there had long been a tradition of expertise, fostered by the need to authenticate works based on the highly technical nature of the assessment.

22The history of the consolidation of expertise helps to understand the trial and error process and grey areas of ordinary economic practices in music and entertainment. Behind the scenes, the entire chain of production agents had to meet daily challenges thanks to knowledge that was rarely certified institutionally and was not always recognized socially. For example, there was no fixed criterion to establish an artist’s exact value on the labour market in order to draw up an adequate contract, nor was there a standard template for the document.

3. Political Economy, Arts, and Morality

23From the eighteenth century onwards, economics became a scientific discipline and a field of knowledge (Larrère 1992; Perrot 1992; Schabas 2005). What is known as “political economy” was essentially constructed in administrative spheres, in the service of power or close to it. In France, the aim was to encourage the royal state to establish free trade, particularly in the grain sector, as François Quesnay and the Marquis de Mirabeau (senior) did. Liberal economic policy was initially supported by proponents of the “science of commerce,” such as Vincent de Gournay, who produced theoretical reflections rooted in the realities of the commercial world, in order to promote the adaptation of transactions to specific circumstances (Charles, Lefebvre & Théré 2011; Orain 2023). These writings, like other economic treatises, addressed the arts in the debate concerning the proper distribution of wealth and in the quarrel over luxury (Provost 2014).

25In addition to the condemnation of luxury, there was a secondary condemnation: that of entertainers themselves. In 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith devoted a few lines to entertainment activities, in a chapter on the cause of wage inequalities. He noted that society compared theatre and opera performers to prostitutes, and that if they were highly paid, it was to compensate for the moral stigma that burdened them (Smith 1776: 131).

26While the commercialisation of leisure was already quite advanced in the eighteenth century, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world (Brewer 2000), the secondary place of music and the performing arts in the political economy discourse can be explained by its doctrine. Physiocrats sought to establish laws explaining the production and circulation of wealth, with the idea that it could only stem from the land. Therefore, workers in the farming and manufacturing sectors were valued because they shaped and transformed materials that could be directly consumed or exported abroad, thus promoting general growth. Often removed from the arts, physiocrats stuck to commonplaces about the more or less dubious morality of artistic activities, whose concrete role they could not really envision so that they struggled to integrate them into the production models known to create wealth.

28Therefore, it has seemed relevant to complement our critical reflection on the limits of political economy scholarly discourse by integrating the tools of domestic economy practitioners into our attempt to understand the rationalities of ordinary economic actors.

4. Presentation of the Issue

29This issue explores the relationships between the performing arts and the economy between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries from the perspective of ordinary practices. It extends the reflection initiated in the seminar “Une histoire matérielle de la musique et des arts du spectacle : d’une économie domestique à une économie politique (xvi^e-xx^e siècle)” (A Material History of Music and the Performing Arts: From a Domestic Economy to a Political Economy [Sixteenth-Twentieth Century]), organized between 2021 and 2023 at the EHESS (French School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) by Rémy Campos and Anne-Madeleine Goulet.

30The first guiding principle for the authors in this issue was to compare old documents—essays, polemical pamphlets, press articles, papers linked to the production of concerts and shows referred to as practical writing, such as accounting, legal, or notarial documents—with contemporary concepts that could be drawn from books on domestic or political economy (Boutier 1996). In order not to limit these documents to the discourse emanating from economists or traditional sources of economic history, we sought to identify the concrete economic practices that existed at the time, although they might not have been formalised theoretically.

31Drawing on three areas of artistic practice (labour, finance, and production), the case studies gathered here shed light on the way in which new skills emerged from everyday activities and ordinary artistic practices.

32The first two articles consider labour-related economic aspects. Suzanne Rochefort studies the development of engagement contracts for theatre artists in Paris and elsewhere in France during the 1790s. The clauses featured in these documents became increasingly complex, thanks to the experience of over a century of commercialisation of leisure activities, and more generally the codification of professions in which services, whether artistic or non-artistic, were offered. The notion of labour, which is central to the economy as well as to the arts, also took on new importance within the Union des femmes artistes musiciennes (UFAM, Union of Women Musician-Artists), which is the focus of the second study, conducted by Apolline Gouzi and Arthur Macé. Between 1910 and 1930, this organization ceased to be structured around the charity economy, and after fierce debates on the topic within it, it eventually adopted assistance through work as its principle.

33A second set of articles assesses how expertise and theoretical reflections concerning finances fit together in the fields of music and the performing arts. Guillaume Cot delves into the concept of debt and its place in late eighteenth—and early nineteenth-century theatre. By jointly analysing political economy treatises and the dramaturgy of plays, the article identifies the different representations of the system of financial and moral obligations, as well as the relationships between economic thought and artistic production. Rémy Campos examines 1870s theatrical statistics, which reveal accounting practices that were vastly different from specialists’ calculation methods. These practices reflected a popularized science aimed both at keen theatre-lovers and politicians, which entertained newspaper readers, but also fuelled debates on theatre financing.

34Lastly, Clément Noël’s study of the Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple, created by Gustave Charpentier in 1897 during the Montmartre Vachalcade festivities, shows how the producer of a stage production adapted to the conditions of its performance. Thanks to the economic skills acquired on the job by its creator, this open-air show, which combined song, ballet, and pantomime, subsequently travelled throughout Republican France until the 1950s, adapting to each town’s financing possibilities.

35All the authors in this issue have had to overcome a difficulty that we deliberately left aside in our historiographical presentation: that of the category used to refer to our common object. The concept of the economy alone did not suffice to encompass the multiple realities discussed. One of the purposes of our approach through ordinary knowledge was to put forward long-term analyses of discourses or actions that were related to the material elements of music and theatre, and were not formalized at the time. Such an approach thus allows considering music and the performing arts within other frameworks than those to which they are usually associated, whether aesthetic or formal, philological, institutional, or didactic.

36Such a presupposition requires providing a list of forgotten stakeholders and a lexicon for an economy that rarely spoke its name, as well as a typology of the situations in which it existed. Behind the question of vocabulary lies that of the meaning of words for the stakeholders themselves, as well as the ambiguity of contemporary concepts used to describe their practices: contract, philanthropy, or production are all terms that an approach focused on the practical rationalities of live performance calls for rethinking. Beyond language choices, the question of the techniques used also arises. Were the account books of a princely court similar to those of a banker? Did those who kept the former write the latter? And when this was not the case, what skills were exercised by theatre people and how did they acquire them?

37The cases included in this issue shed light on the great variety of non-academic intellectual techniques widespread among artists: compilation or reconfiguration, when the ordinary salary entries of late eighteenth-century actors borrowed from those used in other professions or from foreign playhouses; adjustment, when an art-for-all activist like Gustave Charpentier adapted the budget for revivals of his monumental show, the Couronnement de la Muse du Peuple, to local situations; or translation from one language to another when transforming theatre accounting figures into edifying statistics to be published in newspapers.

38Furthermore, the world of art professionals was rife with disagreements over the interpretation of the numerical description of running a theatre, the definition of debt, the nature of artists’ contracts, or the state of the labour market for women musicians. The detour into old works of political economy shows that specialists also disagreed on the definition of terms, and on how these terms fit within comprehensive explanations. Having observed these divergences, it becomes apparent that the definition of the scope of concepts is a fully-fledged object for historical reflection. Thus, philanthropy can be seen purely as a matter of aid, but also as one of the cogs in the mechanism of artistic production, or yet as an individual gift outside paid work.

39Practical rationalities have never been confined to the solitary exercise of skills learned by experience. Thus, plays have been the locus for discussing financial issues, not in the chapters of a treatise, but rather as dialogues fitting within a dramatic plot. This enactment of the economy within fiction generally operated through commonplaces. Reeling off adages on the nature of debt, for example, Molière’s Dom Juan (1665) showed the audience mechanisms of borrowing and repayment that relied on social ties, such as marital relationships, which were not necessarily financial. Accounting and morality were constantly intertwined on stage, while the performative effect was undeniable in the house, since the performance proposed collective economic rules to the group for their approval. Along the same lines, statistics drawn from theatre operating figures in the last third of the nineteenth century fuelled the public debate on the allocation of funds for subsidised theatres. Under the guise of entertaining readers, the daily press provided material for economic thought—though it did not speak its name—with concrete effects on the livelihood of performance venues.

40Let us hope that these lines of inquiry will lead other researchers to closely examine the continuum of economic techniques used by musicians and performing arts professionals, from the most minuscule, unsophisticated calculations to the numerical debates brought into the public arena—in other words, to closely examine the place of generalisation in an approach centred on the study of “modest” economic practices. The challenge is all the greater given that in some cases expertise, which was based on empiricism and the “cobbled-together” knowledge of merchants and craft workers, was marginalized by the grand narrative telling of the rise of political economy (Orain 2023). Nevertheless, the construction of abstraction was possible when certain practitioners in the field seized upon the theoretical thinking of their time. This was the case of physiocrats, who inspired entertainment reformers at the end of the eighteenth century, or that of UFAM members or of Gustave Charpentier, who spent time in the reformist circles of the early twentieth century and whose ideas ended up reaching art professionals.